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The way into the underland is through the riven trunk of an old ash tree.
MJP 10/3/2019
The same three tasks recur across cultures and epochs: to shelter what is precious, to yield what is valuable, and to dispose of what is harmful.
Claustrophobia is surely the sharpest of all common phobias.
Where the River Elbe flows through the Czech Republic, summer water levels have recently dropped so far that ‘hunger stones’ have been uncovered – carved boulders used for centuries to commemorate droughts and warn of their consequences. One of the hunger stones bears the inscription ‘Wenn du mich siehst, dann weine’: ‘If you see me, weep.’
Viewed from the perspective of a desert or an ocean, human morality looks absurd – crushed to irrelevance.
We are often more tender to the dead than to the living, though it is the living who need our tenderness most.
We give bodies and their residues to the earth in part as a means of safekeeping.
The cascade is a baroque structure. Flowstone is the name given to the calcite deposits that precipitate out of minerally saturated water as it runs over the slopes of limestone caves. You might imagine flowstone as a kind of white candle wax, gradually hardening as it runs, though it is built up over spans of time rather than by brief incandescence.
Returning from Toronto. 10/13/2019. MJP
Little demons of worry bite at my stomach
The most notorious story in British caving history involves a twenty-year-old Oxford philosophy student called Neil Moss.
Before sleep I read Harrison’s The Dominion of the Dead. I copy out a few sentences from early in the book: For the first time in millennia, most of us don’t know where we will be buried, assuming we will be buried at all. The likelihood that it will be among our progenitors becomes increasingly remote. From a historical or sociological point of view this is astounding. Uncertainty as to one’s posthumous abode would have been unthinkable to the vast majority of people a few generations ago.
apotropaic
A ruckle is a group of boulders that have caved against one another, blocking a section of passage, but through the gaps of which a path might just be traced.
A charm of goldfinches flitters away, the birds’ high song glittering around us.
It is a paradox of his work that in order to watch the stars he must descend far from the sun. Sometimes in the darkness you can see more clearly.
Packers beat Lions 23-22. 10/14/2019
Swiss astronomer called Fritz Zwicky
To perceive matter that casts no shadow, you must search not for its presence but for its consequence.
What these observations and others like them suggest is that only around 5 per cent of the universe’s mass is made of the matter we can touch with our hands and witness with our eyes and instruments.
Astronomers call this ‘baryonic matter’, because the overwhelming share of its mass is due to protons and neutrons, known to physicists as ‘baryons’.
Theirs is hard, philosophical work, requiring patience and something like faith: ‘As if’ – in the analogy of the poet and dark-matter physicist Rebecca Elson – ‘all there were, were fireflies / And from them you could infer the meadow’.
‘I see that bin bags make up the vital outer layer of your crystal ball,’ I say. ‘You mock,’ replies Christopher, ‘but duct tape and bin bags have proved crucial to more scientific breakthroughs than you’d imagine.’
We ramp up into a potash seam. Neil brakes the van to a halt in a swirl of dust, jumps out, cracks a fat flake of potash off the tunnel wall and hands it to me. It is pink as meat and flecked with silver mica. It is surprisingly light, almost buoyant in the hand. ‘Lick it,’ says Neil. It fizzes on my tongue. It tastes of metal and blood. I want to eat it all.
the Holocene – the epoch of Earth history that we at present officially inhabit, beginning around 11,700 years ago
Philip Larkin famously proposed that what will survive of us is love. Wrong. What will survive of us is plastic, swine bones and lead-207, the stable isotope at the end of the uranium-235 decay chain.
The Anthropocene asks of us the question memorably posed by the immunologist Jonas Salk: ‘Are we being good ancestors?’
As a species, we have proved to be good historians but poor futurologists.
Occasionally – once or twice in a lifetime if you are lucky – you encounter an idea so powerful in its implications that it unsettles the ground you walk on.
At Aurora for a CT scan. mjp 10/18/2019
Our growing comprehension of the forest network asks profound questions: about where species begin and end, about whether a forest might best be imagined as a superorganism, and about what ‘trading’, ‘sharing’ or even ‘friendship’ might mean between plants and, indeed, between humans.
We are coming to understand our bodies as habitats for hundreds of species of which Homo sapiens is only one, our guts as jungles of bacterial flora, our skins as blooming fantastically with fungi.
Again and again within such societies, the jungle or woodland is figured as aware, conjoined and conversational.
Waiting at CVG to go back home. 10/24/2019. MJP
So I use my phone to summon the satellite network, and pull up a hybrid map of the forest. Sixty-three distinct chemical elements including rare earth metals and minerals mined mostly in China interact within the casing of my device.
During his second season on the island, Merlin became interested in a type of plants called ‘mycoheterotrophs’ – ‘mycohets’ for short. Mycohets are plants that lack chlorophyll and thus are unable to photosynthesize.
‘Why should we expect fungi and plants to behave as humans started to behave economically in the eighteenth century, with the emergence of the limited liability corporation? I find it so bizarre. It’s one reason I love the Voyria. They demand immediately that you go beyond cost-benefit analysis when thinking about plant life.
Potawatomi, a Native American language of the Great Plains region, includes the word puhpowee, which might be translated as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight’. In ‘all its technical vocabulary’, Robin Wall Kimmerer notes, ‘Western science has no such term, no words to hold this mystery.’
Potawatomi is a language abundant with verbs: 70 per cent of its words are verbs, compared to 30 per cent in English.
Words are world-makers – and language is one of the great geological forces of the Anthropocene.
They stick in the throat in two ways: they are difficult to utter and hard to swallow.
Seeking sleep, my mind follows leaf to branch, branch to trunk, trunk to root and from there down along the hyphae that web the earth below.
On plane to Savannah for Sea Island meeting. MJP 10-28-2019
eschaton,
The name that will be given to this discovered city is Derinkuyu, meaning ‘Deep Well’.
Attempts to police the space were formalized: specialist police – quickly nicknamed ‘cataflics’ and ‘catacops’ – were trained in the network’s geography.
‘Chatière
Then silence falls as tiredness does, with stealth and force. I drift into Escher-dreams of stairways that lead back on themselves, tunnels folding like Möbius strips, shifting rooms, and monkey gods with flames for eyes.
Urban exploration might best be defined as adventurous trespass in the built environment.
am sceptical of the dandified nature of its photographic culture, which seems chiefly to refocus the problems of Caspar David Friedrich’s iconic 1818 painting, Wanderer above a Sea of Fog.
mudlarkers
the Basilica Cistern in Istanbul.
No security agency still steams open letters or reads people’s postcards; instead they watch text and WhatsApp conversations, and packet-sniff emails.
She mistrusts formal qualifications, preferring to judge people on their capacity for empathy.
Fewer than twelve people in history have dived below a depth of 790 feet using scuba equipment.
Off to Cincinnati. MJP 11/14/2019
